A Toronto startup called Figure 1 Inc. raised 2 million Canadian dollars in seed funding to scale a new, photo-sharing app built especially for the needs of medical professionals, VentureWire has learned. Rho Canada Ventures and Version One Ventures led the investment.

Chief Executive Gregory Levey, a co-founder of Figure 1 with Joshua Landy and Richard Penner, said it’s flattering when bloggers call the company’s app an “Instagram for doctors,” yet that is something of an oversimplification.

Since the blockbuster acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for $1 billion, and contrasting shutdowns of funded photo-sharing apps like Everpix, Color Labs and PicPlz Inc. (to name just a few) the very concept of funding a photo-sharing app draws criticism.

But investors in Figure 1 see the company as a mobile health venture, and the company’s technology as a collaboration platform for medical professionals, says Roger Chabra, a partner at Rho Canada Ventures.

So far, the app has been popular with medical students, and professionals across a broad spectrum in the field encompassing attending physicians, nurse practitioners, dentists, x-ray technicians and physicians’ assistants.

To help its users stay compliant with federal privacy laws and other relevant mandates, Figure 1 was built with “redundancies to protect patient’s privacy, yet allow consultations,” Mr. Levey explained.

First, the Figure 1 app includes a digital consent form where a patient can “sign on-screen” to grant permission for their health-care providers to share an image.

The app also features automatic facial blurring and instructions and tools that prompt users to get rid of potentially identifying details in any image they upload, such as a tattoo in a photo, or a name or number on an x-ray.

Finally, users of Figure 1 can elect to share images within a designated private group of colleagues or more broadly within the medical community.

Figure 1 co-founder Dr. Landy, who is also a physician, said the app is actually more privacy-conscious than the old ways of knowledge- and image-sharing within the field.

“Taking photos you want to refer to later, and following a patient through the evolution of their treatment,” is normal he said. Doctors used to keep and share a “teaching file” full of printed matter.

Figure1.com

In recent years, medical students and doctors who are accustomed to mainstream technology (such as Facebook , Instagram and Pinterest) may have used apps built for generic photo-sharing, but couldn’t do so confidently due to a lack of privacy, compliance and security features, he said.

Mr. Chabra said Rho Ventures is bullish on mobile digital health in general. The investor also believes Figure 1 is in a position to become “an indispensable tool for medical professionals and students, and part of [their] everyday workflow around the world.”

Figure 1 currently offers its app free and has not yet generated revenue. However, Mr. Chabra believes, “If they continue to grow at the [current] pace, they will have lots of monetization options in the near future,” thanks to their reach and engagement with the world’s 30 million medical professionals, and medical students and dentists too.

In the U.S., health-care and pharmaceutical companies will spend $1.18 billion on digital advertising this year, according to eMarketer research.

Mr. Levey said the company will use its funding to hire Android and Web developers, and to make new and improved versions of and features for Figure 1.

Write to Lora Kolodny at lora.kolodny@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @lorakolodny

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